Gary McDonogh. Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture

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CINDY WONG

Polish Americans

Immigrants from Poland have developed a strong ethnic

community,

which they

commonly refer to as Polonia, serving both the interests of the immigrants and

endeavoring to contribute to the emergence of an independent Poland.

The first Poles to arrive in the United States in large numbers were the political exiles

from the 1848 revolutions. In the 1880s they were joined by many economic emigrants

from occupied Poland pulled by the lure of jobs in America’s burgeoning cities. These

immigrants concentrated in major industrial centers, primarily in the

Midwest

(

Buffalo,

NY, Chicago, IL, Detroit, MI,

Milwaukee, WI, Cleveland, OH

and

Pittsburgh, PA)

and the

Northeast

(New York

City, NY,

Philadelphia, PA,

and

Boston

). Polonia

emerged in these cities around the

Roman Catholic

Churches and the flourishing

newspapers

. Polish

Jews

tended to be identified by

religion,

replicating divisions in

their homeland. Poles were also strongly committed to labor and socialist movements

(stemming from their revolutionary activity earlier in the century), and New York’s

Polish Socialist Alliance in America published

Rabotnik Polski

(Polish Worker).

As was the case for many other ethnic groups, legislation in the 1920s virtually cut of

fresh immigrants just as the independent nation emerged. But, the Polish community

started to grow once again in the 1940s. With the Nazi invasion of Poland in 1939 many

refugees (mainly Catholic) ended up coming to the United States. This trend accelerated

after the Second World War, when the

Truman

administration used the Displaced

Persons Act of 1948 to allow Poles fleeing Soviet occupation to enter the US. Between

1945 and 1954 as many as 178,000 Poles arrived in the country, and 75,000 more

followed prior to the easing of immigration restrictions in 1965.

Many of these new arrivals were either

intellectuals

or professionals. Having grown

up in an independent Poland and wishing to protect Polish culture, they often came into

conflict with the blue-collar leaders of Polonia. Such friction occurred at a time also

when many second- and third-generation Polish Americans were beginning to leave the

areas of Polish concentration and move to the

suburbs

. A simultaneous revival o

cultural practices and communal organizations in the city occurred within the residual

community that remained behind, so that when the 1960s rejection of suburban lifestyles

and the celebration of ethnicity occurred, the Polish American culture was still vibrant.

This strong sense of ethnic identity was drawn on by novelists like W.S.Kimiczak in

The

1,000 Hour Day

(1966) and the better-known, albeit controversial, Jerzy Kosinski.

By 1969, census estimates placed the Polish American community at about 4 million

eople, though many Poles felt that this was a significant under count and that the

number was above 6 million. With its size and its concentration in particular metropolitan

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 886

areas, the community wielded considerable political influence. Since the

Roosevelt

era,

Poles had been aligned with the

Democratic Party,

especially in local elections

(emphasizing the Democrats’ appeal to workingclass and Catholic immigrants). After the

war, Poles tended to change their national vote according to American foreign policy and

the handling of the Soviet Union. Truman lost Polish American voters to Dwight

Eisenhower,

who made various promises about winning back territory from the USSR.

John F.

Kennedy,

as the first Catholic president and a hawk in foreign policy was able to

recapture them; while the failure of the Polish candidate Edmund

Muskie

to win the

Democratic nomination in 1972 persuaded many Polish Americans to vote for

Nixon

(an

irony since it was later shown that Nixon’s dirty tricks had helped to destroy Muskie’s

candidacy). But Polish Americans also fit within the Nixon image of the “Silent

Majority” working-class ethnics on whom the

Republicans

hoped to build their new

post-

civil-rights

constituency And, while nine out of ten Poles had voted for

Roosevelt,

during the

Reagan

years only about half were voting Democratic.

Besides Muskie, a senator for Maine, several other Polish Americans have been

rominent in politics. John Dingell has been the Chairperson of the Energy and

Commerce Committee; Leon Jaworski, led the

Watergate

investigation; and Zbigniew

Brzezinski, a

Cold War

immigrant, was Jimmy

Carter’s

hawkish National Security

advisor. The success of such individuals has gone a long way to counteracting the

negative stereotypes associated with Polish Americans. “Polish jokes” have been a staple

in comedy houses and the

networks’

sitcoms,

long after Irish and black jokes have been

considered in bad taste. In “All in the Family” (CBS, 1971–9), for example, Archie

Bunker mercilessly ridiculed his son-in-law, Michael Stivik, allowing the show to expose

many of the issues associated with stereotyping and, since Michael was clearly much

smarter than Archie, to contest them as well.

Since the end of the Cold War and the collapse of the Soviet bloc,

immigration

from

Poland has continued at variable rates. Return migration and support for the new state

have also been more common, especially with the revival of the Polish economy.

Further reading

Bukowczyk, J.J. (1996)

Polish Americans and Their History,

Pittsburgh: University of

Pittsburgh Press.

Lopata, H.Z. (1993)

Polish Americans,

New Brunswick: Transaction Publishers.

Pula, J.S. (1995)

Polish Americans: An Ethnic Community

New York: Twayne

Publications.

Thomas, W.I., Znaniecki, F. and Zaretsky E. (eds) (1995)

The Polish Peasant in Europe

and America,

Urbana: University of Illinois Press.

ROBERT GREGG

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Political Action Committees (PACs)

PACs are political organizations that collect money, either from their members or the

general public, and redistribute it to political candidates or

parties

that support their

interests. Although some form of political action committee probably existed as early as

the late 1940s (the Committee on Political Education is considered one such early

example), PACs were only formally authorized with the passage of the Federal Election

Campaign Act of 1974. There are two types of PACs: segregated fund PACs, which are

allowed to collect money only from their members, and non-connected PACs, which

raise their money from the voting public. PACs in modern American politics represent a

wide variety of interests, ranging from environmental groups to conservative religious

churches to pro-choice advocates.

PACs increase democratic participation in that they allow their members and

contributors to effect political decision-making, at least indirectly, but their influence on

the democratic process has become extremely controversial. For one thing, like political

lobbyists

more generally they are often suspected of subverting the public good for

sectarian ends. Thus PACs representing occupational groups such as teachers or

lawyers

find themselves accused of directing legislation to the advantage of their members’

interests but to the detriment of the public good. Moreover, as their influence has grown,

and more particularly as their monetary contributions have skyrocketed, they have helped

increase the importance of fundraising generally As a result, professional politicians must

now spend much of their time and energy raising money to help finance their campaigns,

at least if they wish to be elected or to stay in office. This obviously reduces the amount

of time and attention they can devote to the actual business of the legislature. It also

raises the question of to whom, exactly the politician is beholden: the general public, or

the special-interest PACs that provide the bulk of the campaign’s financial support?

A related issue arose in the 1990s with the advent of so-called “soft money.” In an

effort to reduce the importance played by money in politics, particularly in campaign

advertising, some legislatures attempted to place restrictions on the amount that a

candidate could spend in a campaign. However, as long as they advertised not directly for

a particular candidate but for some issue or set of issues, special-interest groups such as

PACs could spend unlimited amounts of money. These so-called “soft-money”

expenditures seemed to allow campaigns to subvert the intent of the restrictions with

highly charged and often partisan ads. In the 1996 federal congressional campaigns, for

example, the AFL-CIO spent millions of dollars attacking

Republican

candidates.

Moreover, whereas candidates must account to the Federal Election commission for all o

the money that they spend within their campaigns, PACs are not always under such

requirements.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 888

As with political lobbying more generally however, there are constitutional issues

relating to freedom of speech and of assembly that have hampered most attempts to

curtail the influence of soft money and of PACs more generally. As a result, many

otential candidates for public office in modern American politics are judged on their

viability that is whether and how well they can raise PAC and other special-interest

money. This has only contributed to a growing cynicism about the ability of some private

groups and individuals to “buy” politicians in order to determine public policy.

ee also:

parties and elections

Further reading

Plano, J.C. and Greenberg, M. (1997)

The American Political Dictionary,

Fort Worth:

Harcourt Brace.

Safire, W.F. (1978)

Safire’s Political Dictionary,

New York: Ballantine Books.

MARK BREWIN

political consultants

While American politicians have always relied on advisors, the visibility of political

consultants increased in the late 1960s, particularly as

television

became a crucial part o

American politics. In

The Selling of the President

(1968), Joe McGinniss chronicled how

Richard

Nixon’s

campaign staff promoted the Republican presidential candidate like a

consumer product to appeal to voters.

By the late 1980s, political consultants became nearly as prominent as the candidates

for whom they worked. Roger Ailes and Lee Atwater were successful in transforming the

image of Republican nominee and

Vice-President

George Bush, helping him win the

1988 presidential election.

James Carville and others were credited with overcoming the controversies

surrounding

Democratic

presidential candidate and Arkansas Governor Bill

Clinton

win the 1992 presidential election. Their efforts were portrayed in the

documentary

film,

The War Room

(1993). Carville and his wife,

Republican Party

consultant Mary

Matalin, co-authored a book,

All’s Fair

(1994), a memoir of their role in the campaign.

Consultants have also produced election controversies. After Republican nominee

Christine Todd Whitman won the New Jersey gubernatorial election, Whitman’s

strategist, Ed Rollins, said he paid

African American

clergymen to discourage black

voters, likely supporters of incumbent Jim Florio, from going to the polls. Rollins later

retracted his claim.

ollywood

has featured political consultants in movies of fictional campaigns.

The

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Candidate

(1972) and

Bob Roberts

(1992) were accounts of Senate contestants who

lacked experience but whose appearance and charisma, combined with consultants’

packaging, charmed the electorate.

JAMES DEVITT

political correctness

Seemingly innocent phrase used by conservatives and others to denigrate multicultural

efforts and sensitivities. The phrase evokes insincerity and empty rules, rather than new,

complex worlds of knowledge, behavior and communication that a recognition o

diversity and equality entails. Certainly

colleges

(a frequent target for those who decry

.c. thinking) and other cultural institutions have created missteps as they try to regulate

speech or interpersonal relations or interpret activities through a rigid template of

race,

class

and gender. Nonetheless, attempts to deconstruct cultural patterns based on

white

male dominance prove both difficult and threatening towards those conservatives who

throw this term (like

“family values”

) around rather freely

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

political science

The study of political relations between and within countries, political science covers

topics as diverse as congressional committees in America, the development of cultural

and political identities in Zambia and the arms race between Pakistan and India. In the

American academy the discipline is usually divided into four sub-disciplines: American

olitics, which covers such topics as the study of American political institutions, the

olitical actions of the American public and the study of policy formation within the US;

comparative politics, involving the study of the internal politics of other nations with the

goal of understanding how political institutions develop or operate in different settings;

international relations, the study of the relations between countries, may focus on

international institutions like the United Nations, or on the study of less formal networks

of communication; and political theory which encompasses the study of more broadly

theoretical approaches to politics and, in developing concepts for interpreting leadership

and democracy, often has a more normative orientation than the work of the discipline as

a whole.

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 890

American political science began to emerge as an academic discipline in the late

nineteenth century. The creation of the discipline was tied in with the Progressive

movement, a movement determined to end the practices of corrupt party politics and

party machines,

especially in

cities

. The discipline’s orientation towards reform lasted

until the 1940s, when an increasing drive towards professionalization and establishment

of political science as a “science” led to a decreased concern with political reform and

greater attempts to consider politics in an objective, and hence uninvolved, manner.

Political scientists of the day considered questions of democratic legitimacy answered;

interest groups insured that citizens’ wishes would be heard. The political upheavals o

the 1960s brought on a re-evaluation of this neutrality within the discipline; however,

many of should be removed from politics. Political science these scholars still accepted

that political science remains a discipline that is generally not reformoriented.

Recently there has been some concern over whether the discipline has become too

fragmented. As training has become increasingly focused on achieving mastery of one or

maybe two subfields, and language becomes more specialized, it has become less likely

that scholars will even be aware of work done outside their subfield. The use o

sophisticated mathematical models excludes from dialogue those without advanced

mathematical training. While this lack of communication between scholars from different

subfields is of increasing concern, it is unclear whether anything can or will be done.

Further reading

Seidelman, R. (1985)

Disenchanted Realists,

Albany: State University of New York

Press.

EMILY CLOUGH

Pollock, Jackson

b. 1912; d. 1956

Renowned

abstract expressionist

painter. He departed wildly from pre-war painting

conventions, and yet was perhaps as well known for his chaotic, impassioned life. His

acclaim and artistic style—dripping and staining paint, using hard brushes and sticks in

broad sweeps atop large canvases laid on the floor—as a way to unravel a purer form o

expression and emotionality helped to move the center of the art world from Paris to

New

York

. In 1945 he married the painter Lee Krasner and his tumultuous career took off for

a number of years, in part due to the support of critic Clement Greenberg. His work fell

out of favor with the ascension of

pop art,

but recent art shows have restored Pollock’s

enduring importance.

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ee also:

modernism; abstract expressionism

EDWARD MILLER

polls

As currently understood, “polls” refer to techniques that combine some form o

questionnaire with advanced statistical techniques to produce measurements of public

opinion. Although informal straw polls were already used to give rough measures o

olitical support in the latter part of the nineteenth century, they did not gain widespread

use until the twentieth century. Political writers such as Walter Lippmann, and social

scientists such as Floyd Allport, dissatisfied with subjective descriptions of public

opinion, began to look for more rigorous methods of measuring what the public thought

of an issue. Social scientists and journalists began to look upon polls, which could be

standardized and which also allowed for a more or less accurate measure of public

opinion, as a way to solve the need for objectivity in discussions of public opinion.

Despite some notable failures—including an infamous poll run by the

Literary Digest

for

the 1936 presidential election, which seriously misread the level of support for the

incumbent Franklin D.

Roosevelt

—the poll became a nearubiquitous element in public

discourse. Although the Gallup organization is still probably the most famous polling

group, numerous other firms have developed reputations for their expertise. The Nielsen

company’s polls on television viewing patterns, for example, provided perhaps the single

most important measurement for most of the American

advertising

industry in the

second half of the twentieth century.

At the same time, the increasing use of the polling data has provoked criticism. Critics

of modern political journalism argue that news reporters rely too much on “poll-driven”

stories, especially during elections. Political news thus is reduced to stories about which

candidate is ahead in the polls, and the strategies used either to get the lead or retain it;

discussion of actual policy proposals is pushed aside. Others argue that as a measure o

ublic

opinion, polls are essentially misguided, since what they are measuring is in fact

an aggregate of various

private

opinions. More critical theorists point out that polls offer

only a limited number of responses to questions, effectively ignoring—and thereby

marginalizing—opinions that are too radical or that cannot be standardized. Even social

scientists who use polls extensively admit that they present measurement problems,

especially the under-reporting of socially deviant behavior and the over-reporting o

sociallysanctioned actions.

These criticisms have provoked changes to polling procedures in recent years.

Although polls are still essential to election-year coverage, many news organizations

have become more circumspect in their use of polls to drive political news. Among social

scientists there is a move to supplement polling with the use of focus groups and

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 892

interviews, or through the development of “deliberative polls,” in which the polling

questionnaire is supplemented by in-depth interviews and interaction between members

of the subject population. It remains an open question, however, whether polls as such

“measure” or in fact “create” public opinion.

Further reading

Herbst, S. (1993)

Numbered Voices,

Chicago: University of Chicago Press.

Merkle, D.M. (1996) “The National Issues Convention Deliberative Poll,”

Public

Opinion Quarterly

60(4): 588–619.

Peters, J.D. (1995) “Historical Tensions in the Concept of Public Opinion,” in Glasser, T.

and Salmon, C. (eds)

Public Opinion and the Communication of Consent,

New York:

The Guilford Press.

Sudman, S. and Bradburn, N. (1982)

Asking Questions,

San Francisco: Jossey-Bass.

MARK BREWIN

pool

bars

pop art

Augured in the 1950s in the work of

neoDadaists

Robert

Rauschenberg

and Jasper

Johns, the American incarnation of pop art, as it emerged in the 1960s, was a movement

immersed in the visual languages, vernacular iconography and means of production o

opular culture. Although the term was first applied to a group of British artists in the

1950s, even their work was largely based on the images of an American

mass media

Characterized by Andy

Warhol’s

silkscreened icons of American commodities and

celebrity

culture, Roy Lichtenstein’s billboard-sized homages to the graphic style and

pathos of the comic strip and Claes Oldenberg’s monumental sculptures of household

appliances and fixtures, pop art elevated the quotidian objects and concerns of postwar

American culture into the rarified realm of high art, forever changing the meaning of that

oncesanctified term.

Beyond its playful repetition of certain Dadaist strategies of quotation and

appropriation and its reiteration of the Duchampian challenge to modernist autonomy and

the institutions of art, pop art also evidenced a return to the thwarted political aspirations

of Berlin Dada. Manifested most powerfully in James Rosenquist’s pictorial assaults on

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American militarism or Edward and Nancy Kienholz’s mixed-media indictments of the

moral bankruptcy of American society even Warhol’s pictures ultimately oscillate

etween their veneer of bland complicity with and idolatrous celebration of contemporary

popular culture and a more acute language of cultural critique.

Further reading

Madoff, S.H. (ed.) (1997)

pop art: A Critical History,

Berkeley: University of California

Press.

LISA SALTZMAN

popcorn

Variant on a

American Indian

staple, popcorn (with butter and salt) has become

intertwined with American fun—state

fairs,

the

circus,

sports and movies as well as

family spectatorship. The latter includes

holiday

traditions like making caramel popcorn

alls for Halloween (disappearing with concerns for the security of homemade goods)

and stringing popcorn to decorate Christmas trees. Microwave popcorn has also been

added as a snack in video chains and offices. Popcorn has been touted as a low-calorie,

high-fiber food; reports on movie-theater popcorn’s fat and cholesterol in the 1990s,

however, forced a change in preparation if not eating.

GARY McDONOGH

CINDY WONG

popular culture

Popular culture is difficult to define, partly because both terms—“popular” and

“culture”—have meant different things at different points in history depending on the

theoretical or disciplinary framework employed. In the simplest terms, popular culture is

culture that is widely favored by many people—the culture “of the people.” But this

definition leaves unanswered the question of what culture is and what, if anything,

differentiates popular culture from other conceptual categories such as folk culture, mass

culture, or

workingclass

culture. In making distinctions, social, economic and aesthetic

criteria are not easily disentangled. For example, “culture” can refer to: (1) a general

Encyclopedia of Contemporary American Culture 894

process of intellectual, spiritual and aesthetic development (“the development of Western

culture”); (2) the expressive activities of communities and societies, as in sports,

holidays,

festivals, ceremonies; or (3) particular intellectual and artistic practices, as in

literature, painting,

dance

and song (Storey 1993). “Popular” can mean not only “of the

people,” or that which is well-liked by a large number of individuals, but also “common,”

accessible to the average person, and even “inferior” (Shiach 1989).

As Storey has pointed out, it is often easier to understand popular culture in contrast to

what it is not. Perhaps most obviously, popular culture is not elite or “high” culture,

which is, by definition, unpopular and exclusive. Nor is popular culture synonymous with

folk culture or working-class culture. The former generally refers to culture that is local,

non-commercial and expressive of a particular group or community identity (quilting,

folk tales, or

folk music

); the latter, to texts and practices associated with a working-class

sensibility and enjoyed primarily by members of the working class (nickelodeons,

burlesque, bingo or

bowling,

as well as organizational strategies). Of course, all three

types can, and often do, overlap. Yet there is no direct one-to-one relationship between a

class

community

and a particular cultural form. To paraphrase Stuart Hall (1981),

“class” and “popular” are deeply related, but they are not absolutely interchangeable.

Moreover, it is important to bear in mind when distinguishing popular from elite culture

that these categories are not fixed or static, so that what was once considered “low” may

now be “high,” and vice versa. For example, Shakespeare was once the most popular

playwright in America, but his works were gradually “rescued” from the marketplace and

enshrined in official institutions controlled by wealthy patrons; as a consequence,

Shakespeare became high culture, the purview of the social and intellectual elite (Levine

1988). Likewise, as Storey notes, the seaside holiday began as an aristocratic practice and

within a hundred years had become a popular one, while

film noir

started as a despised

opular cinema and is now the preserve of academics and film critics. Thus it is not the

specific contents of the categories “high” and “low” that matter, since these change over

time, but the fact that a distinction exists, one that tends to sustain cultural hierarchy.

Nor is popular culture simply mass culture, although the overlap is perhaps greatest

here. Indeed, in highly industrialized contemporary societies like the US, there is very

little that we might call the culture “of the people” that is not derived from commercial

culture and that is not dependent upon commercial consumption for its expression.

Consequently, American popular culture is increasingly tied to mass culture, and, by

implication, to mass production and mass consumption. This association more than

anything reinforces popular culture as high culture’s opposite: low, vulgar and base;

lacking in creativity originality and tradition.

So what distinguishes popular culture from mass culture? The difference lies less in the

specific content than in the relationship between content and consumer. According to

Storey, Fiske (1989) and other scholars, mass culture consists of the texts, objects and

relations of the culture industries; popular culture is what people make of those texts,

objects and relations. For example, the culture industry produces many

television

rograms, but how people understand them and what role television plays in everyday

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